HEALTHY AT 100 (32 page)

The women who participated the most actively in the meetings experienced the greatest lengthening in survival time. Although all of the women in the study had been considered “terminal,” three were still alive when Spiegel made his presentation twelve years after the study began. Tellingly, these women were among those who had been most involved in the sessions.

Spiegel was not the only medical professional who was astonished at the results. Dr. Troy Thompson, a professor of psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, remarked, “This is a marvelous study, a surprising study to me as well. I would have bet the mortgage of my home that it would not have come out this way.”
⁷

If a chemotherapy drug existed that had the ability to increase survival as greatly as participation in the emotional support group did, it would be adopted as the standard of care and administered to virtually all women with metastatic breast cancer. Pharmaceutical companies would be making billions of dollars off the drug. Patients would be paying many tens of thousands of dollars each, and would be willing to endure toxicity and reduction in quality of life from the chemotherapy in order to obtain the added years. The support group, on the other hand, cost almost nothing, and added substantially to the women’s quality of life.

Could Spiegel’s study have been an aberration? A few years later, Dr. F. I. Fawzy and his colleagues at the University of California at Los Angeles Medical School conducted a study similar to Spiegel’s, this one dealing with the survival rates from malignant melanoma in two groups of patients. As in Spiegel’s study, the patients in both groups received the same medical treatments, and were equivalent at the beginning of the study in how far their cancer had progressed. The only difference was that one group also met regularly for mutual support. Five years later, the researchers were stunned to find that individuals in the group that did not participate in the support group were three times more likely to have died than those who had the opportunity to talk to others about their experiences.
⁸

I do not know of any study that has found a higher incidence of disease or mortality for people with strong social support than for those without. But many important studies tell us that people with more love in their lives and more social support have
lower
incidence and
lower
mortality from cancer and many other diseases.

I believe these studies are providing us with a glimpse into one of the deep secrets of health and longevity.

“We cannot live for ourselves alone,” wrote Herman Melville. “A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow man.” Perhaps this explains why we are often moved by people caring deeply for one another. A story illustrating the point, perhaps apocryphal, is told by a friend of mine, the noted author Dan Millman:

Many years ago, when I worked as a volunteer at Stanford Hospital, I got to know a little girl named Liza who was suffering from a rare and serious disease. Her only chance of recovery appeared to be a blood transfusion from her five-year-old brother, who had miraculously survived the same disease and had developed the antibodies needed to combat the illness. The doctor explained the situation to her little brother, and asked the boy if he would be willing to give his blood to his sister. I saw him hesitate for only a moment, before taking a deep breath and saying, “Yes, I’ll do it if it will save Liza.”

As the transfusion progressed, he lay in a bed next to his sister and smiled, as we all did, seeing the color returning to her cheeks. Then his face grew pale and his smile faded. He looked up at the doctor and asked with a trembling voice, “Will I start to die right away?”

Being young, the boy had misunderstood the doctor. He thought he was going to have to give her
all
his blood.
⁹

We find it inspiring to think of a child being so selfless and generous that he would give his life for his sister. The fact that such a simple story can move our hearts is evidence that we are all capable of acting
from our higher selves more often than we do, that we are all capable of more cooperation than we often think.

There are also medical implications to whether we think of others or only of ourselves, as Larry Scherwitz found out when he conducted a most unusual study. Now the director of research at California Pacific Medical Center’s Institute for Health and Healing in San Francisco, Dr. Scherwitz taped the conversations of nearly six hundred men. About a third of these men were suffering from heart disease; the rest were healthy. Listening to the tapes, he counted how often each man used the words
I, me
, and
mine.
Comparing his results with the frequency of heart disease, he found that the men who used the first-person pronouns the most often had the highest risk of heart trouble. What’s more, by following his subjects for several years thereafter, he found that the more a man habitually talked about himself, the greater the chance he would actually have a heart attack.
¹⁰

Apparently, counting the times a person said “I” was an ingenious way to quantify self-absorption. It seems that the less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers. Dr. Scherwitz counsels: “Listen with regard when others talk. Give your time and energy to others; let others have their way; do things for reasons other than furthering your own needs.”

This is sound medical advice, and it speaks also to our spiritual and emotional needs. Many religions have taught that being trapped in the illusion of separateness is the source of much of our suffering.

Modern Western society, of course, has become highly competitive. You see it perhaps most conspicuously in sports. “Winning is not the most important thing,” said the famous football coach Vince Lombardi. “It’s everything.” Said another coach, “Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.” I’m sure these coaches were trying to urge their players on to greater effort, but when we become hyper-competitive, we may lose touch with honor, decency, and sportsmanship. And we almost certainly lose touch with each other.

Special Olympians train long and hard for their events and are every bit as committed to winning as are athletes in other athletic competitions. The Special Olympics is not a casual social outing. These are highly organized sporting events taken very seriously by all
involved. But people at the Special Olympics Washington office have verified that the following incident took place at a 1976 track and field event in Spokane, Washington:

Nine contestants, all physically or mentally disabled, assembled at the starting line for the hundred-yard dash. At the gun they all started out running as fast as they could. All, that is, except one boy who stumbled on the asphalt, tumbled over a couple of times, and began to cry. Hearing the boy cry, several of the others slowed down and paused. Then they turned around and went back. One girl with Down’s syndrome bent down and kissed him, and said, “This will make it better.” Then they all linked arms and walked together to the finish line. Everyone in the stadium stood, and the cheering went on for ten minutes.

Why do we find a story like this so moving? Could it be that beneath the many ways we have of being separate, we are nevertheless somehow deeply part of each other? Can children sometimes remind us of an essential part of our humanity that we so easily forget in modern society?

In societies like Okinawa, Vilcabamba, Hunza, and Abkhasia, there are many forms of healthy competition, but no one is ever shamed because of being less able. Who wins is important for the moment, but then immediately forgotten. The quality of how people treat one another is remembered long after.

Most of us are conditioned to view as scientifically valid only that which can be measured in a laboratory. Something as fuzzy and ephemeral as human relationships can seem “touchy-feely,” hardly the stuff of sound science. But sophisticated research has confirmed that we are social creatures to our core, and our sense of being in touch with others and feeling connected to them has enormous implications for our health and longevity.

When researchers from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland studied almost ten thousand married men with no prior history of angina (chest pain indicating heart disease), they found that
those men who had high levels of risk factors—including elevated cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, and electrocardiogram abnormalities—were more than twenty times as likely to develop angina during the next five years. They were amazed to discover, though, that those men who answered “yes” to the simple question “Does your wife show you her love?”
had substantially less angina even when they had high levels of these risk factors.
¹¹

In a related study, researchers followed 8,500 married men with no history of ulcers. These men were given a questionnaire to fill out, and then tracked for five years. Those men who reported a low level of love and support from their wives at the beginning of the study were found to have more than twice as many ulcers in the ensuing five years as the other men. And those who said “My wife does not love me” were almost three times as likely to develop ulcers. In this study, having the feeling that their wives didn’t show them love and support was more strongly associated with ulcers than smoking, age, high blood pressure, or job stress.
¹²

The medical value of intimacy, of having a loving relationship with a spouse or a very dear friend, became overwhelmingly apparent to researchers who published a study in the
British Medical Journal
in 1993.
¹³
For seven years, they followed 752 men. At the outset of the study, these men had been given a medical exam during which they were asked about their emotional stress. The study found that those men who had reported being under serious emotional stress at the time of their initial exam—who were experiencing financial troubles, feeling insecure at work, defending a legal action, or going through a divorce—had more than triple the risk of dying during the seven years following the initial exam. Being under these kinds of stresses at the beginning of the study turned out to be a stronger predictor of dying within the ensuing seven years than medical indicators such as high blood pressure, high concentrations of blood triglycerides (linked to coronary artery disease), or high serum cholesterol levels.

Okay, you might say, serious stress breaks people down and can even kill them. That’s no surprise, but what does it have to do with love? What made this study astounding was that for those men who
said at the outset of the study that they had a dependable web of intimacy—a spouse or close friends—
there turned out to be no correlation whatsoever between high stress levels and death rate.

Loving relationships, medical science is clearly telling us, have an extraordinary ability to defuse the negative medical effects of stress. And we have some understanding of the mechanism by which this happens.

Certain hormones (cortisol and the catecholamines epinephrine and norepinephrine, which are also called adrenaline and noradren-aline) are produced in your body when you are under stress. When these chemicals are secreted and surge through your body, your immune cells are less able to perform their functions, leaving you more susceptible to disease. In this way, stress suppresses immune resistance. There may be an evolutionary wisdom operating in this suppression, in that energy is conserved, enabling your body to put a priority on handling the immediate emergency. In extreme instances this could make the difference between life and death. But if stress continues over time, your health inevitably suffers. Social support seems to neutralize the effect of stress by lowering the production of these stress hormones.

Modern research is now repeatedly finding that your relationships with others are medically potent.
Your connections with the significant people in your life
—
if they are positive and loving
—
can prevent stress-induced illness, greatly contribute to your health and healing, and add many years to your life.
This corroborates what we’ve seen in Okinawa, Abkhasia, Vilcabamba, and Hunza. An abundance of positive, meaningful relationships is one of the secrets of the world’s healthiest and most long-lived peoples.

One of the most remarkable people I’ve had the good fortune to know is Eleanor Wasson. The recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award given by Physicians for Social Responsibility for her outstanding work for world peace, Eleanor, now nearly 100 years old, is still alert, vital, strong, healthy, and actively working for a better world. I’ve known Eleanor for many years, and I’ve found her always to be an uplifting and inspiring influence on others, even under the most challenging circumstances. I talked to her shortly after the publication of her autobiography, titled
28,000 Martinis and Counting: A
Century of Living, Learning, and Loving.
I asked what she would consider the secret to a long and healthy life. “Having loving parents,” she said. “I always felt loved as a child. I had such wonderfully loving parents that I never knew, until years later, that not everyone had that gift in their lives. And maintaining friendships. Deep and lasting friendships are precious beyond words.”

In modern society, we can get so busy that we don’t take time to feel our gratitude and receive the blessings of our relationships. Too often, we fill our lives with so much activity that we don’t have room left for the people who matter to us. We can make possessions more important than people.

This is a mistake that people living the traditional way of life in Abkhasia, Vilcabamba, Hunza, and Okinawa rarely make. They are not woken by alarm clocks. Instead, they often wake to the sound of others singing. Instead of going shopping, they go to visit one another. They have need of few belongings, for they belong to each other.